Today is Monday, first of the two days off from the Satsangs with Mooji.

We slept longer, there was a marriage in our Ganga View Guest House, with loud music till late in the night. We got up around 11 o'clock and went to the German Bakery, above the bridge, to have breakfast.

We bought two tomatoes and yak cheese rolls and went to look for a place on the river, from the side of Ram Jhula, on the curve just after the rapids. It is a nice area with big rocks and grey sand in between, where there is normally nobody except perhaps a sadhu to do his daily cleanings. We found a big rock with some shadow, where we could sit on the sand, just beside the river.

Very nice to relax there, looking at the powerful river passing...sometimes a bird with long neck and beck was flying few centimeters above the water...once in a while a rubber boat full of Indians tourist, with safety jackets on, was arriving trough the rapids...

...and the unexpected happened...five men carrying something heavy folded in a maroon blanket...five, six meters from us...it was clearly a corpse inside.

They put it close by the water and started unfolding it. They throw the blanket and the shawl that was covering the body in the river...It was the body of an old men, almost a skeleton. They started washing him, with a lot of carefulness, taking the water from the Ganga with a cup and letting the water falling first on the head and mouth, then along the all body. One of them, a sadhu, burned some incenses moving it above the body. Two other men meanwhile where arriving with many heavy stones and we started understanding...They put two rings of yellow flowers around his neck...few notes of 10 rupees...some food (a Pooja)...they covered first the body with a longhi and put it inside two brown bags of juta, one from side of the head and one from the legs...with all the big stones also in...they sewed the connections of the bags and with a long big rope they tight the bags on the body, like a pack that had to do a long journey...Another man came with a long stick of wood that passing through the rope was used to lift the body to be taken inside the river, ten meters from the beach...to let it go...

No special prayers, the all event was made in a simple, but careful way. One sadhu was smiling at us, telling us with his arms that they were making a send off into the river. Immediately after the body was in the water, they all undressed and took a bath, cleaning their bodies from all the eventual negative energy they had to deal with.

We were touched from what we saw...probably somebody with no family, nobody to pay for the wood of a cremation. Namaste.